Nut Of The Week

I now realise why I don’t travel first-class on airlines. The class of person you find there isn’t what it used to be.

Take this incident, reported this week, which happened on board a Korean flight from New York to Seoul. A passenger, Cho Hyun-ah, for it was she, who just happens to be the daughter of the airline’s chief executive, asked for some macadamia nuts to nibble on prior to take off. She was aghast when the flight attendant presented her with a bag of nuts a la economy rather than carefully poured out on to a plate or, preferably, a silver platter. There was a risk that she might have damaged her carefully (and, doubtlessly expensively) manicured fingernails in fighting with the bag to extricate the nuts.

This outrage, naturally, was too much for la Hyun-ah who immediately demanded to see the in-flight service manual to check company policy on serving nuts in first-class cabins – I am not sure whether the policy relates to the fruit with the hard shell and edible kernel or people of temporary or permanently deranged mind. Good to know, in the absence of Boris Johnson to sort things out, airlines have procedures to deal with this sort of emergency.

Having rifled through the manual and, presumably, finding no satisfaction, Hyun-ah ordered the attendant off the plane – fortunately for all concerned the plane was still on the ground. All in all, the kerfuffle delayed the flight by 11 minutes.